As I’ve mentioned, I’m building out the UI component set for Ribbit. There have been quite a few setbacks on this process, the biggest ones being bugs in the Flash IDE itself. I’ve already blogged about the problems with inspectable setters and custom parameter UIs. Today’s problem has to do with component icons.
Yes, I’m getting down to the tail end of this project and taking care of details like adding in live previews and icons and documentation. So I go to associate custom icons with each of the components I created. How to do it?
Well, there is a IconFile metadata tag. That works if you are creating a SWC, but not otherwise. These will be FLA based components, so you can edit the assets.
Then, there is a little button you press in the Component Definition dialog. This gives you a dropdown of predefined icons. At the very bottom is an item for a custom icon. Nice! That opens up a file dialog allowing me to search for Fireworks (.png) files. Hey, that’s exactly what my icons are! Nice again!
But wait. I can’t select any of my icons. Must be in the wrong format or something. Mess around with that. No joy. Well it must work for the icons for the components that come with Flash. Hmm… no, that doesn’t work either. So how the hell did Grant get icons on his components???
As usual, the answer came from asking Grant directly. And the answer was pretty straightforward. “That doesn’t work on a Mac.”
Gah!
So here I am downloading Flash CS3 to my Parallels XP install, so I can add icons. Yay. Well, Grant said it took him 3 days to figure that one out. I wasted most of a day all told on it. Hopefully this will save a few other people a few more hours.
I gotta say, Adobe really dropped a few balls with CS3, particularly in terms of the IDE features required for making components and making them work. Hopefully, I’ve found the last one. 🙂
Yep, I found that one too. I tried creating all different types of PNGs, and nothing worked. Only way around it was through the Windows version.
Doesn’t really surprise me.
What did surprise me was that they made it EVEN harder to make “proper” components in this release. It was so darn easy in MX and every release have made it harder. Why do I need to read 120 pages of PDF docs (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/creating_as3_components.html) just to get small bits in place? AND why is there type errors in the UIComponent files that comes with CS3? Can I even patch them without breaking the EULA?
J
I kind of understand why some things would only work on a pc. It’s one of the reasons i keep one around the office, just in case. What is annoying is that it’s not clear that is the case. If it’s pc only it should be in big bold letters somewhere in the window. “THIS FEATURE ONLY WORKS ON PC”. I haven’t had that happen to me too many times, but a day wasted on that kind of problem by numerous people could be saved if 2 minutes was spent to get that in the UI.
thanks for keeping us all aware of these issues in cs3 =)
We also encountered this problem and found that it worked in Windows but not on Mac so I sent the bug report to Adobe and they replied saying that they are aware of this. The bug is that it has not been set to recognize .png files.
They did however supply a workaround, which works perfectly. All you have to do is go to Flash > preferences – select General and check “enable version cue”.
Ah, good to know, Joel. I’m a bit afraid of Version Cue though. There’s another bug with PhotoShop which causes PhotoShop to crash whenever you try to open or save a file. I ran into this one and it made PhotoShop completely un-usable. And the fix for that is to disable Version Cue in PhotoShop. 🙂
I wonder if that’s the reason why Flash has been crashing so frequently (although not every time) since enabling it. In any case, you can always enable Version cue for the sake of adding the icon (as this will enable you to locate the .png) and then you can enable it. This should work as the icon will remain embedded in the component.
yeah, if I need to redo these icons, I’ll try it, but otherwise I’ll leave it off.
Just saved me some time 🙂
What if you put your icon in the same folder with CS3 icons? Will it show up on the list?
No, it doesn’t matter where the icons are. You can browse to them and see them, but can’t select them. But apparently you can if you enable Version Cue. Haven’t tried it myself, but will next time if I need to.
Thanks so much for publishing this … you’ve saved me TONS of time.